


Every Lethally Dangerous Spatio-Temporal Anomaly Has a Silver Lining

by lurknomoar



Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [12]
Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Fluff and technobabble, Kissing, Lost in the Cosmos, Other, Stranded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23345929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: Tilly once made a pinky promise to an interdimensional telepathic fungus entity wearing the face of her best friend from middle school: she promised they would meet again. Tilly finds herself fulfilling that promise, although not in the way she intended.
Relationships: May Ahearn/Sylvia Tilly, Sylvia Tilly/"May Ahearn" (jahSepp)
Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1467382
Comments: 7
Kudos: 7





	Every Lethally Dangerous Spatio-Temporal Anomaly Has a Silver Lining

**Author's Note:**

  * For [centrumLumina (centreoftheselights)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/centreoftheselights/gifts).



> I remember talking to centrumlumina about this ship, and the terrible dearth of Sylvia/May stories. We agreed that Tilly by all means ought to have a mushroom girlfriend. I sketched out a fic, but never really completed it. But now I'm posting a short, fluffy story about two very different creatures from two very different worlds meeting in the void and kissing a little.
> 
> Please be warned, the technobabble in this is terrible. I know nothing about astrophysics.

Tilly is drifting, rocked slowly but inexorably by the invisible tides of the spatial distortion she had volunteered to investigate. She is completely alone in the shuttle, no fuel no comm no nav no shields, life support still online but threatening to give out at any moment. She is going to die. She takes a deep breath, looks down at her hands, (red, everything is red in the dim glow of emergency lighting), her hands red on the uselessly, feebly flickering console, and tries to figure out what to do next. Her choices are accepting that she is dying, and trying to occupy herself with some nice thoughts – or refusing to accept it, and trying to find some way to restart a shuttle that is clearly, obviously, irrevocably dead. Neither seems very appealing. She stares out the window, at the swirling clouds of the spatial anomaly she is here to examine. Maybe she has a third choice. Even if she isn’t going to make it out alive, she still could make some observations – the shuttle’s survey equipment is fried, but she still has her handheld, much weaker, true, but better than nothing. And if she made observations and came to some useful conclusions it wouldn’t matter that she was dying, well, it would still matter, it would matter a lot, but it would feel better, and it would really _be_ better, because whoever found her body wouldn’t just find a body, they’d find a body and half a research paper, which is exactly the sort of silver lining she would ask for if she had to identify the body of a beloved colleague. She idly wonders what Stamets would write if he had half an hour to live, but concludes that he’d just write a very long letter to his husband. Boring. Well, not boring, but not very science either.

She gets up, walks to the shuttle’s cockpit, turns her handheld towards the swirling semi-visible thing outside, and starts taking readings. The numbers are so extraordinarily strange that they double right back into boring. What she is looking at isn’t part of the natural, comprehensible world. It is garbled, impossible non-world. Still, if only she could catalogue the ways in which it doesn’t make sense…

She is reprogramming her light spectrum detector, trying to disengage the algorhythm that accounts for cosmic microwave background and replace it with something that accounts for the relic radiation of a fundamentally different universe when she hears a cough. It’s a polite, well-mannered but slightly impatient little cough, and at first she is prepared to ignore it, couldn’t they tell that she was busy? But a split second later she remembers that she is completely alone in the shuttle, alone in an abandoned, garbled pocket of the universe, and she whips around, almost dropping her handheld.

May Ahearn is standing on the other side of the shuttle, wearing a dark-blue Starfleet uniform.

‘Am I hallucinating,’ says Tilly, hearing the strange dull suprise in her own voice.

‘Not particularly,’ replies the apparition, with a quick smile. ‘You’re under great stress, but at this point mostly mentally sound.’

‘Let’s just,’ Tilly sighs. ‘Let’s just ignore that if I was hallucinating you that is exactly what I would have you say. Assuming you’re not a hallucination, how are you here?’

‘You’re on the fringes of a nasty, ugly tangle in reality,’ chirps May. ‘The warp and weft of dimensional planes is all messed up, and I could sneak though to see you.’

Tilly nods, then turns it into shaking her head as she remembers how far into the future she’d fallen.

‘But we’re… not where we used to be!’ she exclaims. ‘We’re a thousand years from where we we last were, how come you could still find me?’

‘Oh, linear time,’ the visitor says, shrugging the whole concept away with distaste. ‘I forgot that you people had that. Rest assured, it doesn’t really matter here.’

‘Well, thank you for showing up,’ says Tilly, feeling slightly hysterical. ‘But I am, as you said, hurtling towards a nasty ugly tangle in reality, and I would very much like to get out.’

‘Why?’ asks May, pouting. ‘It’s a weird, creepy place, sure, but we can at least talk to one another. Why are you in such a hurry to leave?’  
‘Because it is almost certainly going to kill me,’ answers Tilly, and hears her voice wobble. Not good. Keep it together.

‘All right,’ said May. ‘What do you need?’

What does she need. A hug, a mug of hot cocoa and a good night’s sleep, but she knows she isn’t getting any of that. What she’s getting is a JahSepp, a fungus-based alien entity wearing the shape of her best friend from middle school, offering help, seemingly with no agenda. That would have to suffice.

‘Uh, could you please go over the shuttle’s reading of the anomaly?’ Tilly says finally. ‘I have to know what exactly I’m dealing with. Or take your own readings if you can, you might pick up something that is extrasensory for us.’

May nods, picks up Tilly’s handheld and starts going throught the data. For a few seconds Tilly watches her at work, not quite understanding what she is seeing: May isn’t reading the data, isn’t looking at it with her eyes, but absorbing it through the skin of her hands where they touch the device, faint sparks of light shifting to and fro as she wrinkles her forehead, deep in thought. Tilly shakes her head and goes back to her own calculations.

It’s strange, working with May. May is clearly brilliant, with a personal and alien understanding of dimensional distortions, but she also seems to have no idea what numbers are, and shows great difficulty in comprehending the concept. Often, instead of explaining something, she tries to mime it with her hands, but it is clear that she isn’t exactly used to having hands either, so neither speech nor charades conveys exactly what she originally meant to say.

‘There is a… way!’ she exclaims eventually. ‘Look, you have to be _like that_ and then go _such way_.’

Tilly doesn’t get it.

‘It’s so simple,’ whines May, but nevertheless begins to sketch out something approximately comprehensible on the screen of the handheld device. Long lines mean the vectors of force pulling their shuttle inwards, crosshatching is where the plane folds in on itself, the little dots are temporal anomalies, and the big swirly thing in the middle must be the helix of the spatial distorition’s centre.

‘No, silly Stilly,’ says May. ‘That’s you! You can tell because I drew all your hair.’

Tilly is touched, but no closer to understanding what is going on.

‘This is how you get out!’ May continues. ‘I can help you shift the entire shuttle to a little pocket dimension and then you can just float out of this mess like a, what is the floaty shiny thing, like a soap bubble!’

‘Won’t that… kill me?’ asks Tilly.

‘No, not if you continously recalibrate the fluidity of your interdimensional state to adjust for the external pressure. It’s like...’ May falls silent, and Tilly gets the most uncomfortable feeling that she is reading the appropriate metaphor out of Tilly’s own mind, or at least searching her memories of when she shared Tilly’s consciousness. ‘It’s like divers! If they come up too fast, the pressure gets them, they get air in their blood and boom! But if they come up slowly, they’re fine.’

Tilly looks at the map May charted, looks at it knowing what she’s looking at: passing through the anomaly this ways seems almost impossible, but only almost. She’s going to have to sap power from emergency lighting and life support to give the thrusters enough juice for one last maneuver. And then, she’s going to have to steer through something that is manifestly not space, but then again, she was never much good at normal 3D space navigation either, she dreaded flying lessons and she still has nightmares about her Evasive Maneuvers and Flight Safety exam. If she makes a mistake, she will die, but if she stays in this warped, strange place, she’ll almost certainly die as well. The best case scenario is that the life support stays on, and she stays alive while the emergency rations last, and then eventually dies of dehydration – no, if the water reclamation system still works, she’ll have some metallic-tasting water to drink, so it will be the starvation that gets her, weeks later. As best case scenarios go, this isn’t very good. And she knows that the Discovery isn’t coming for her – not that she doesn’t trust them, she knows that her crewmates would risk their lives to get her out, it’s just that they have no idea how the anomaly works, and even if they were foolhardy enough to fly into it blindly, they would be no nearer to finding Tilly. They’d lose themselves in a folded, twisted infinity and come no nearer to her, no nearer at all.

‘I’ll go,’ she says, weakly. ‘I’ll go with the next temporal wave. In fifteen minutes.’

May looks at her, the curiosity on her face slowly fading away into concern.

‘All right,’ she says, and doesn’t sound any braver than Tilly herself. ‘What do you need?’

Tilly considers her almost-certainly-impending death, and thinks about what she needs.

‘Can I get a hug?’ she asks finally, and is fully prepared to take it back when May hurtles forward and wraps both her arms around her, holding her tight, pinning her arms to her sides. It’s a weird, stiff hug verging on the uncomfortable as May’s elbows dig into her at strange angles. But then she shifts a little, and May melts against her, snuggles up against her, and Tilly suddenly feels calmer than she has in a long time, a very long time, closes her eyes and just drifts. She startles when she feels May press a soft little kiss onto her cheek.

‘This is weird,’ she says immediately, cursing herself for her lack of filter. ‘I mean not the kiss, not that the kiss wasn’t weird, I’m not saying it wasn’t weird, or that it was, I’m not sure yet. But you still look like my best friend from middle school.’

‘Should I look like...’ May’s form shudders, turns into the lanky, bearded figure of Ash.

‘No,’ protests Tilly.

May shifts into Michael, but still smiles that enthusiastic May-like smile.

‘No!’ repeats Tilly with a shudder.

‘If I try to express what I really look like in the mycelien plane, you won’t be able to comprehend most of it, and what you comprehend will be hard to parse as a sentient being.’

Tilly tries to say something, but May forges on, still wearing Michael’s shape.

‘It’s not your fault, your mind’s not wired to see me as I see myself. If you see me as I visually appear, you see something alien. I want you to see me like I see myself, as something familiar.’

‘It’s nice of you to wear a humanoid shape for me,’ concedes Tilly. ‘Could you maybe choose someone I don’t personally know?’

‘But all I have to go on are humans you personally know or have known!’ May points out. ‘Maybe a composite?’ And quick as a lightning, she starts flashing through the bodies of what looks like all the people Tilly has ever met, male, female, old and young, mostly human but with a handful of Vulcans and one Orion in the mix. After a dizzying minute, she settles on a new image, frowning, looking at her hands, touching her face. She has the sharp eyebrows of Tilly’s strictest Biochemistry instructor, she has the callused hands of the bass guitarist from Five Winds Roar, a band she used to like, she has the twisty, braid-laden hairdo of a Communications cadet she roomed with in second year before she requested a different room due to Tilly’s snoring, and the hip-to-waist ratio of a drunk stranger Tilly still remembers dancing with some years ago at a street party. It doesn’t escape Tilly’s notice that the composite elements all belong to people Tilly is, or used to be, quite terribly attracted to. It also doesn’t escape her notice that although May looks completely different now, nothing like the May Ahearn she had once pretended to be, she is still a short woman with dark skin, and a slightly pinched expression on her heart-shaped face.

‘I like looking like this,’ May says defensively. ‘I like this size, and this hue, and this, this gender I think. It’s not what I am, but it’s a reasonably good translation. I am small, and sharp, and _like so_.’

‘I like it,’ says Tilly. ‘And I like that you are like this.’

And then she kisses May. Straight on the mouth. A second later, even before she had the time to enjoy the kiss, she realizes that she has no idea what she’s doing, that she’s in the middle of a volatile spatio-temporal anomaly kissing a very friendly but very very strange alien entity, but then it turns out she freaked out too late, she completely missed the time window when freaking out would have been feasible, as May has grabbed her head and began to kiss back with great enthusiasm and a similarly great lack of expertise. It’s terrible and really, really great, and it’s over way too soon. May breaks away, pulls back, grins.

‘You like this!’ she exclaims. Then, wondering, tilting her head, she adds ‘You like so many things. I like how you like them.’

Tilly can feel heat flood her face, she knows she’s blushing blotchy and red and she couldn’t care less, she clutches at May to pull her into another kiss, and May goes obediently, letting Tilly take the lead. May’s hands are in her hair, taking down her bun and passing inquisitive fingers through her locks over and over. Tilly distinctly notes, while still clutching May, that despite May’s human appearance, the fingers in her hair don’t feel human at all, they feel like something that moves by different rules, swift and fluid and skittering. It’s somewhat disconcerting, and that just makes it that much better.

‘Anomalous loop recommences. Reaching egress point in five minutes,’ chimes Tilly’s handheld. Tilly breaks the kiss, startled: she would not have believed that ten minutes have passed.

‘I don’t want you to go,’ said May, her mouth still almost on Tilly’s, both her hands clutching fistfuls of Tilly’s hair.

‘You could come with me?’ says Tilly. ‘You can take over my body and come to our universe that way, I wouldn’t even mind.’

‘You hated it the last time!’

‘The last time, you did it without asking, or without explaining what was going on! I was terrified! But this time, I’m up for it.’

May smiles at her, bright, brighter than she would have taught possible, but still shakes her head.

‘I don’t want to leave my plane behind just like you would never leave yours. You would never leave your people or Discovery, and that’s sad, but I am the same way.’

‘Will we even see each other again?’ asks Tilly, feeling choked up, feeling the tears welling up in her eyes, as the computer voice on her handheld reminds her ‘reaching egress point in three minutes.’

‘I know we will,’ says May with a wet, watery smile. ‘Me and my… not friends… not family… doesn’t translate, me and my people, we have been working on our own ways to step across dimensional boundaries. We’re not there yet, but we will be.’

‘Good,’ says Tilly.

‘And until we do,’ continues May. ‘Please look for anomalies, twists and turns and warps like this one where we might talk. Be careful, promise you’ll be more careful than you were this time, and we might see each other again.’

‘I promise, May,’ Tilly says.

‘I changed not to look like May,’ May says, quickly, urgently. ‘I changed how I looked so you would see me differently so you would see me as a romantic option because I see you as… not like that, but something analogous to that. I changed how I look and I should change the name, too.’

‘Should I just give you a name? Katy or Himiko or Upenda or something?’ wonders Tilly. ‘Wait, no, you probably have your own name, don’t you?’

May – not-May – nods.

‘You called me May,’ she says. ‘May is like… this.’

Through a feeble telepathic drift, Tilly gets an impression of sunlight, the steady warmth of sunlight paired with a soft, gentle breeze.

‘But I am more like...’ not-May continues, and Tilly sees, or not quite sees, but thinks, experiences a scintillating little glitter of bioluminescence, reflected and refracted, sharp, shifting, unpredictable and yet with an internal structure to it that she could figure out if only she tried harder.

‘I am that,’ the JahSepp says, shily.

‘It’s a beautiful name,’ breathes Tilly. ‘It’s like how electric light glints off the surface of rippling water. But I still don’t know how to call you.’

‘Glint would be good,’ she says.

‘Reaching eggress point in one minute,’ chimes the handheld.

‘All right,’ says Tilly, much braver than she feels. ‘Time to go.’

‘We’ll meet again,’ says Glint, and Tilly can tell that she’s trying to be reassuring, but it still sounds like a question.

‘I promise,’ says Tilly, and holds up her pinky finger. The fungal alien entity she has renamed Glint hooks her illusion of a little finger around hers, and still her human face looks so lost, so disconsolate that Tilly cannot help but press another brief kiss to her lips.

‘We will,’ she repeats.

‘Reaching eggress point in ten, nine, eight...’

She runs and sits back down in the shuttle pilot’s seat, punches in the meta-coordinates that are to lead her home from this desolate place, and fires all thrusters. The metal walls of the shuttle groan and shudder as she falls forward into the distorted tangle of dimensions. The emergency lighting flickers then goes out as the machine diverts all its remaining energy to forging ahead. It is in the complete, disorienting darkness that Tilly feels a hand stroke her hair one last time, hears a quiet voice say ‘see you soon’, and then the world breaks, space fractures, time becomes gelatinous, and Tilly almost certainly loses consciousness.

When she comes to, maybe days later, maybe within the second, Tilly is alone in the weak red light of the half-dead shuttle, and ahead of her, she can see the the shining hull of Discovery inviting her home.


End file.
